Increasingly vehicles are equipped with satellite, cellular, and/or other vehicular communication systems that enable the vehicle to communicate with one or more remote devices, such as a backend server that is maintained by the manufacturer of the vehicle or another trusted entity. These remote devices may communicate with the vehicular communication system to gather information regarding the vehicle (e.g., mileage, engine temperature, oil level, and other operating information) or to enable or provision certain features on the vehicle (e.g., navigation services and on-call support).
It would be desirable to allow a user of a vehicle to communicate with these remote devices to obtain information regarding the vehicle and/or to change user preferences or other features on the vehicle. One issue that arises when permitting a user to request information regarding a vehicle or to change the settings for a vehicle is authenticating the user's identity. In the absence of such authentication, a malicious individual could pose as a valid user of a vehicle to obtain information regarding a vehicle that they do not own, or to take other undesirable actions.
Accordingly, it is desirable to provide a system for confirming that a user of an electronic device is an authorized user of a vehicle. Furthermore, other desirable features and characteristics of the present invention will become apparent from the subsequent detailed description and the appended claims, taken in conjunction with the accompanying drawings and the foregoing technical field and background.